The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin was joined today by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in filing a petition with the Wisconsin Supreme Court asking the court to require the government to obtain a judicial warrant in order to query data collected by Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) networks.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the Wisconsin Council of Churches and an individual pastor in Green Bay, asserts that retroactive searches of such data is a search that must comply with constitutional standards.
The plaintiffs are suing four Wisconsin cities, including Green Bay, Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha, which operate the AI-assisted systems and allegedly conduct searches of data gleaned from them.
Automatic License Plate Reader networks, which have recently been banned in multiple Wisconsin cities and counties, are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that are typically mounted on street poles, highway overpasses or attached to police squad cars.
They can photograph every license plate and capture identifying characteristics of a vehicle or drivers and passengers. Images are then stamped with a date and time for searchability, uploaded to a server and shared with law enforcement agencies.
“Thousands of automatic license plate readers stationed across Wisconsin have created a mass surveillance machine constantly tracking, logging, and sharing information about us without a warrant,” Wes Haslam, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin, said in a press release.
“These systems allow the government an intimate glimpse into our personal lives — where we live, work, spend our free time, attend school, and practice faith, whether we’ve been to an abortion clinic, a protest, a political event, or a gun store,” Haslam said. “And as we’ve now seen far too many times, it can also be weaponized by rogue officers for personal reasons without judicial oversight.”
